OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
M3GIA: A Cognition Inspired Multilingual and Multimodal General Intelligence Ability Benchmark
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2024
Year: 2024

As recent multi-modality large language models (MLLMs) have shown formidable proficiency on various complex tasks, there has been increasing attention on debating whether these models could eventually mirror human intelligence. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating solely on task performance, such as the accuracy of identifying the attribute of an object. Combining well-developed cognitive science to understand the intelligence of MLLMs beyond superficial achievements remains largely unexplored. To this end, we introduce the first cognitive-driven multi-lingual and multi-modal benchmark to evaluate the general intelligence ability of MLLMs, dubbed M3GIA. Specifically, we identify five key cognitive factors based on the well-recognized Cattell-Horn-Carrol (CHC) model of intelligence and propose a novel evaluation metric. In addition, since most MLLMs are trained to perform in different languages, a natural question arises: is language a key factor influencing the cognitive ability of MLLMs? As such, we go beyond English to encompass other languages based on their popularity, including Chinese, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Korean, to construct our M3GIA. We make sure all the data relevant to the cultural backgrounds are collected from their native context to avoid English-centric bias. We collected a significant corpus of data from human participants, revealing that the most advanced MLLM reaches the lower boundary of human intelligence in English. Yet, there remains a pronounced disparity in the other five languages assessed. We also reveals an interesting winner takes all phenomenon that are aligned with the discovery in cognitive studies. Our benchmark will be open-sourced, with the aspiration of facilitating the enhancement of cognitive capabilities in MLLMs.
MemeGuard: An LLM and VLM-based Framework for Advancing Content Moderation via Meme Intervention
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

In the digital world, memes present a unique challenge for content moderation due to their potential to spread harmful content. Although detection methods have improved, proactive solutions such as intervention are still limited, with current research focusing mostly on text-based content, neglecting the widespread influence of multimodal content like memes. Addressing this gap, we present \textit{MemeGuard}, a comprehensive framework leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) and Visual Language Models (VLMs) for meme intervention. \textit{MemeGuard} harnesses a specially fine-tuned VLM, \textit{VLMeme}, for meme interpretation, and a multimodal knowledge selection and ranking mechanism (\textit{MKS}) for distilling relevant knowledge. This knowledge is then employed by a general-purpose LLM to generate contextually appropriate interventions. Another key contribution of this work is the \textit{\textbf{I}ntervening} \textit{\textbf{C}yberbullying in \textbf{M}ultimodal \textbf{M}emes (ICMM)} dataset, a high-quality, labeled dataset featuring toxic memes and their corresponding human-annotated interventions. We leverage \textit{ICMM} to test \textit{MemeGuard}, demonstrating its proficiency in generating relevant and effective responses to toxic memes.
VALL-E 2: Neural Codec Language Models are Human Parity Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

This paper introduces VALL-E 2, the latest advancement in neural codec language models that marks a milestone in zero-shot text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), achieving human parity for the first time. Based on its predecessor, VALL-E, the new iteration introduces two significant enhancements: Repetition Aware Sampling refines the original nucleus sampling process by accounting for token repetition in the decoding history. It not only stabilizes the decoding but also circumvents the infinite loop issue. Grouped Code Modeling organizes codec codes into groups to effectively shorten the sequence length, which not only boosts inference speed but also addresses the challenges of long sequence modeling. Our experiments on the LibriSpeech and VCTK datasets show that VALL-E 2 surpasses previous systems in speech robustness, naturalness, and speaker similarity. It is the first of its kind to reach human parity on these benchmarks. Moreover, VALL-E 2 consistently synthesizes high-quality speech, even for sentences that are traditionally challenging due to their complexity or repetitive phrases. The advantages of this work could contribute to valuable endeavors, such as generating speech for individuals with aphasia or people with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. See https://aka.ms/valle2 for demos of VALL-E 2.
Experimenting with Multi-Agent Software Development: Towards a Unified Platform
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models are redefining software engineering by implementing AI-powered techniques throughout the whole software development process, including requirement gathering, software architecture, code generation, testing, and deployment. However, it is still difficult to develop a cohesive platform that consistently produces the best outcomes across all stages. The objective of this study is to develop a unified platform that utilizes multiple artificial intelligence agents to automate the process of transforming user requirements into well-organized deliverables. These deliverables include user stories, prioritization, and UML sequence diagrams, along with the modular approach to APIs, unit tests, and end-to-end tests. Additionally, the platform will organize tasks, perform security and compliance, and suggest design patterns and improvements for non-functional requirements. We allow users to control and manage each phase according to their preferences. In addition, the platform provides security and compliance checks following European standards and proposes design optimizations. We use multiple models, such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Llama3 to enable to generation of modular code as per user choice. The research also highlights the limitations and future research discussions to overall improve the software development life cycle. The source code for our uniform platform is hosted on GitHub, enabling additional experimentation and supporting both research and practical uses. \end
PTF-FSR: A Parameter Transmission-Free Federated Sequential Recommender System
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Sequential recommender systems have made significant progress. Recently, due to increasing concerns about user data privacy, some researchers have implemented federated learning for sequential recommendation, a.k.a., Federated Sequential Recommender Systems (FedSeqRecs), in which a public sequential recommender model is shared and frequently transmitted between a central server and clients to achieve collaborative learning. Although these solutions mitigate user privacy to some extent, they present two significant limitations that affect their practical usability: (1) They require a globally shared sequential recommendation model. However, in real-world scenarios, the recommendation model constitutes a critical intellectual property for platform and service providers. Therefore, service providers may be reluctant to disclose their meticulously developed models. (2) The communication costs are high as they correlate with the number of model parameters. This becomes particularly problematic as the current FedSeqRec will be inapplicable when sequential recommendation marches into a large language model era. To overcome the above challenges, this paper proposes a parameter transmission-free federated sequential recommendation framework (PTF-FSR), which ensures both model and data privacy protection to meet the privacy needs of service providers and system users alike. Furthermore, since PTF-FSR only transmits prediction results under privacy protection, which are independent of model sizes, this new federated learning architecture can accommodate more complex and larger sequential recommendation models. Extensive experiments conducted on three widely used recommendation datasets, employing various sequential recommendation models from both ID-based and ID-free paradigms, demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization capability of our proposed framework.
Dynamic Importance Learning using Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) for Nonlinear Dynamic Mapping
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Understanding output variance is critical in modeling nonlinear dynamic systems, as it reflects the system's sensitivity to input variations and feature interactions. This work presents a methodology for dynamically determining relevance scores in black-box models while ensuring interpretability through an embedded decision module. This interpretable module, integrated into the first layer of the model, employs the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) and logistic regression to compute relevance scores, interpreted as the probabilities of input neurons being active based on their contribution to the output variance. The proposed method leverages a gradient-based framework to uncover the importance of variance-driven features, capturing both individual contributions and complex feature interactions. These relevance scores are applied through element-wise transformations of the inputs, enabling the black-box model to prioritize features dynamically based on their impact on system output. This approach effectively bridges interpretability with the intricate modeling of nonlinear dynamics and time-dependent interactions. Simulation results demonstrate the method's ability to infer feature interactions while achieving superior performance in feature relevance compared to existing techniques. The practical utility of this approach is showcased through its application to an industrial pH neutralization process, where critical system dynamics are uncovered.
Evaluation of Posits for Spectral Analysis Using a Software-Defined Dataflow Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.AR 2024
Year: 2024

Spectral analysis plays an important role in detection of damage in structures and deep learning. The choice of a floating-point format plays a crucial role in determining the accuracy and performance of spectral analysis. The IEEE Std 754\textsuperscript{TM} floating-point format (IEEE~754 for short) is supported by most major hardware vendors for ``normal'' floats. However, it has several limitations. Previous work has attempted to evaluate posit format with respect to accuracy and performance. The accuracy of the posit has been established over IEEE~754 for a variety of applications. For example, our analysis of the Fast Fourier Transform shows 2x better accuracy when using a 32-bit posit vs. a 32-bit IEEE754 format. For spectral analysis, 32-bit posits are substantially more accurate than 32-bit IEEE~754 floats. Although posit has shown better accuracy than IEEE~754, a fair evaluation of posit with IEEE~754 format using a real hardware implementation has been lacking so far. A software simulation of posit format on an x86 CPU is about $\mathbf{69.3\times}$ slower than native IEEE~754 hardware for normal floats for a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of $\mathbf{2^{28}}$ points. We propose the use of a software-defined dataflow architecture to evaluate performance and accuracy of posits in spectral analysis. Our dataflow architecture uses reconfigurable logical elements that express algorithms using only integer operations. Our architecture does not have an FPU, and we express both IEEE~754 and posit arithmetic using the same integer operations within the hardware. On our dataflow architecture, the posit format is only $\mathbf{1.8\times}$ slower than IEEE~754 for a Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of $\mathbf{2^{28}\approx 268}$ million points. With this implementation, we empirically propose a new lower bound for the performance of posit compared to IEEE~754 format.
Discover Your Neighbors: Advanced Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic World
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Despite progress, deep neural networks still suffer performance declines under distribution shifts between training and test domains, leading to a substantial decrease in Quality of Experience (QoE) for multimedia applications. Existing test-time adaptation (TTA) methods are challenged by dynamic, multiple test distributions within batches. This work provides a new perspective on analyzing batch normalization techniques through class-related and class-irrelevant features, our observations reveal combining source and test batch normalization statistics robustly characterizes target distributions. However, test statistics must have high similarity. We thus propose Discover Your Neighbours (DYN), the first backward-free approach specialized for dynamic TTA. The core innovation is identifying similar samples via instance normalization statistics and clustering into groups which provides consistent class-irrelevant representations. Specifically, Our DYN consists of layer-wise instance statistics clustering (LISC) and cluster-aware batch normalization (CABN). In LISC, we perform layer-wise clustering of approximate feature samples at each BN layer by calculating the cosine similarity of instance normalization statistics across the batch. CABN then aggregates SBN and TCN statistics to collaboratively characterize the target distribution, enabling more robust representations. Experimental results validate DYN's robustness and effectiveness, demonstrating maintained performance under dynamic data stream patterns.
MaTableGPT: GPT-based Table Data Extractor from Materials Science Literature
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2024
Year: 2024

Efficiently extracting data from tables in the scientific literature is pivotal for building large-scale databases. However, the tables reported in materials science papers exist in highly diverse forms; thus, rule-based extractions are an ineffective approach. To overcome this challenge, we present MaTableGPT, which is a GPT-based table data extractor from the materials science literature. MaTableGPT features key strategies of table data representation and table splitting for better GPT comprehension and filtering hallucinated information through follow-up questions. When applied to a vast volume of water splitting catalysis literature, MaTableGPT achieved an extraction accuracy (total F1 score) of up to 96.8%. Through comprehensive evaluations of the GPT usage cost, labeling cost, and extraction accuracy for the learning methods of zero-shot, few-shot and fine-tuning, we present a Pareto-front mapping where the few-shot learning method was found to be the most balanced solution owing to both its high extraction accuracy (total F1 score>95%) and low cost (GPT usage cost of 5.97 US dollars and labeling cost of 10 I/O paired examples). The statistical analyses conducted on the database generated by MaTableGPT revealed valuable insights into the distribution of the overpotential and elemental utilization across the reported catalysts in the water splitting literature.
A Roadmap for Software Testing in Open Collaborative Development Environments
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Amidst the ever-expanding digital sphere, the evolution of the Internet has not only fostered an atmosphere of information transparency and sharing but has also sparked a revolution in software development practices. The distributed nature of open collaborative development, along with its diverse contributors and rapid iterations, presents new challenges for ensuring software quality. This paper offers a comprehensive review and analysis of recent advancements in software quality assurance within open collaborative development environments. Our examination covers various aspects, including process management, personnel dynamics, and technological advancements, providing valuable insights into effective approaches for maintaining software quality in such collaborative settings. Furthermore, we delve into the challenges and opportunities arising from emerging technologies such as LLMs and the AI model-centric development paradigm. By addressing these topics, our study contributes to a deeper understanding of software quality assurance in open collaborative environments and lays the groundwork for future exploration and innovation.
Efficient Topology-aware Data Augmentation for High-Degree Graph Neural Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as a potent tool for learning on graph-structured data and won fruitful successes in varied fields. The majority of GNNs follow the message-passing paradigm, where representations of each node are learned by recursively aggregating features of its neighbors. However, this mechanism brings severe over-smoothing and efficiency issues over high-degree graphs (HDGs), wherein most nodes have dozens (or even hundreds) of neighbors, such as social networks, transaction graphs, power grids, etc. Additionally, such graphs usually encompass rich and complex structure semantics, which are hard to capture merely by feature aggregations in GNNs. Motivated by the above limitations, we propose TADA, an efficient and effective front-mounted data augmentation framework for GNNs on HDGs. Under the hood, TADA includes two key modules: (i) feature expansion with structure embeddings, and (ii) topology- and attribute-aware graph sparsification. The former obtains augmented node features and enhanced model capacity by encoding the graph structure into high-quality structure embeddings with our highly-efficient sketching method. Further, by exploiting task-relevant features extracted from graph structures and attributes, the second module enables the accurate identification and reduction of numerous redundant/noisy edges from the input graph, thereby alleviating over-smoothing and facilitating faster feature aggregations over HDGs. Empirically, TADA considerably improves the predictive performance of mainstream GNN models on 8 real homophilic/heterophilic HDGs in terms of node classification, while achieving efficient training and inference processes.
SyDRA: An Approach to Understand Game Engine Architecture
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2024
Year: 2024

Game engines are tools to facilitate video game development. They provide graphics, sound, and physics simulation features, which would have to be otherwise implemented by developers. Even though essential for modern commercial video game development, game engines are complex and developers often struggle to understand their architecture, leading to maintainability and evolution issues that negatively affect video game productions. In this paper, we present the Subsystem-Dependency Recovery Approach (SyDRA), which helps game engine developers understand game engine architecture and therefore make informed game engine development choices. By applying this approach to 10 open-source game engines, we obtain architectural models that can be used to compare game engine architectures and identify and solve issues of excessive coupling and folder nesting. Through a controlled experiment, we show that the inspection of the architectural models derived from SyDRA enables developers to complete tasks related to architectural understanding and impact analysis in less time and with higher correctness than without these models.
Online Policy Distillation with Decision-Attention
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2024
Year: 2024

Policy Distillation (PD) has become an effective method to improve deep reinforcement learning tasks. The core idea of PD is to distill policy knowledge from a teacher agent to a student agent. However, the teacher-student framework requires a well-trained teacher model which is computationally expensive.In the light of online knowledge distillation, we study the knowledge transfer between different policies that can learn diverse knowledge from the same environment.In this work, we propose Online Policy Distillation (OPD) with Decision-Attention (DA), an online learning framework in which different policies operate in the same environment to learn different perspectives of the environment and transfer knowledge to each other to obtain better performance together. With the absence of a well-performance teacher policy, the group-derived targets play a key role in transferring group knowledge to each student policy. However, naive aggregation functions tend to cause student policies quickly homogenize. To address the challenge, we introduce the Decision-Attention module to the online policies distillation framework. The Decision-Attention module can generate a distinct set of weights for each policy to measure the importance of group members. We use the Atari platform for experiments with various reinforcement learning algorithms, including PPO and DQN. In different tasks, our method can perform better than an independent training policy on both PPO and DQN algorithms. This suggests that our OPD-DA can transfer knowledge between different policies well and help agents obtain more rewards.
I-SIRch: AI-Powered Concept Annotation Tool For Equitable Extraction And Analysis Of Safety Insights From Maternity Investigations
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2024
Year: 2024

Maternity care is a complex system involving treatments and interactions between patients, providers, and the care environment. To improve patient safety and outcomes, understanding the human factors (e.g. individuals decisions, local facilities) influencing healthcare delivery is crucial. However, most current tools for analysing healthcare data focus only on biomedical concepts (e.g. health conditions, procedures and tests), overlooking the importance of human factors. We developed a new approach called I-SIRch, using artificial intelligence to automatically identify and label human factors concepts in maternity healthcare investigation reports describing adverse maternity incidents produced by England's Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB). These incident investigation reports aim to identify opportunities for learning and improving maternal safety across the entire healthcare system. I-SIRch was trained using real data and tested on both real and simulated data to evaluate its performance in identifying human factors concepts. When applied to real reports, the model achieved a high level of accuracy, correctly identifying relevant concepts in 90\% of the sentences from 97 reports. Applying I-SIRch to analyse these reports revealed that certain human factors disproportionately affected mothers from different ethnic groups. Our work demonstrates the potential of using automated tools to identify human factors concepts in maternity incident investigation reports, rather than focusing solely on biomedical concepts. This approach opens up new possibilities for understanding the complex interplay between social, technical, and organisational factors influencing maternal safety and population health outcomes. By taking a more comprehensive view of maternal healthcare delivery, we can develop targeted interventions to address disparities and improve maternal outcomes.